Hur påverkas ungdomsbrottslighetens nivå av offentliga utgifter ("icke välfärdens kärna" etc)?

Folk som gillar välfärdsstaten hävdar ofta att välfärdsstatliga utlägg på utbud av fritidsaktiviteter samt skola för ungdomar minskar brottslighet och andra sociala problem. Vad finns det för empiri på den frågan? Lars Lindvall erbjuder ett paper i sin avhandling.

"Essay 3 studies, using Swedish municipal panel data, the effects of leisure and school expenditures on the rate of four ‘typical’ youth crimes; robbery, moped theft, assault and graffiti. The low aggregation level of crime data coupled with small populations in many municipalities bring out the discrete nature of crime data, which motivates a count data framework for the analysis. Departing from an exponential model specification, three different estimators are discussed and employed; pooled Poisson, fixed effects Poisson and quasi-differenced GMM. Controlling for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, the essay finds statistically significant effects from overall municipal leisure related expenditures on three of the four crimes. Moreover, the effects differ between the crimes and types of municipalities. No effects are found from upper secondary school expenditures, however."

Lars Lindvall, Public Expenditures and Youth Crime (doktorsavhandling i nationalekonomi, Uppsala universitet 2006), pdf

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UPPDATERING 29 december 2010

Mer om samband mellan sociala faktorer och brottslighet: Bradford Plumer, "Crime Conundrum: Why are rates of violence and theft falling in the recession?", The New Republic 22 december 2010